Czech ex-PM accused of Communist secret police link

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Czech archives have revealed former prime minister and long-serving central bank chief Josef Tosovsky cooperated with the Communist-era secret police (StB), the daily Mlada fronta Dnes reported on Tuesday.

The case, which hit the front page of the leading Czech daily more than 17 years after the end of communism, shows how sensitive Czechs are about their past.

It also fits a pattern seen across the region where people are still coming to grips with the fact that people with links to the communist secret police often rose to high jobs in the unsettled post-communist era.

The paper, quoting interior ministry archives, said Tosovsky drafted economic analyses at the request of the StB and handed over notes from meetings with foreign financiers while he worked as an adviser to the head of the State Bank of Czechoslovakia from 1986 to 1988.

He did not report on colleagues or other people, it added.

Tosovsky, a former Communist Party member and now head of the Financial Stability Institute in Switzerland, denied the report. "I never cooperated with the secret political police StB," he said in a statement.

Former prime ministers Jozef Oleksy of Poland and Hungary's Peter Medgyessy ran into trouble due to secret service links, and Slovakia's former prime minister Vladimir Meciar has faced similar allegations.

Tosovsky, 56, was central bank chief between 1990 and 2000. He was close to former dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel, who chose him as a caretaker prime minister to overcome a crisis which toppled Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus in late 1997.

The Czechs have a law preventing former secret police agents from taking certain high-ranking public jobs.

But because he never signed any pledge of cooperation with the StB and was registered in a category not covered by the law, Tosovsky won clearance to take his position as well as a NATO security clearance.

Tosovsky's case is not an exception, but rather one of several revelations as Communist-era archives gradually open up.

A deputy chief of the public Czech Television faces the sack because he was a member of the People's Militia, the armed forces of the Communist Party.

The head of the Czech Interpol unit was exposed last week, and the Catholic church has said it would work with historians to discover the role of agents in the church.

Earlier this year in Poland, where the right-of-centre government has been keen to push the issue of dealing with its communist past, the Archbishop of Warsaw Stanslaw Wielgus resigned after admitting spying for the secret police.

[PRAGUE/Reuters/Finance.cz]